The Monroe Doctrine essentially told European powers to say out of the affairs of the Americas. In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses.
Perhaps the "World Domination Doctrine" would be a more apt name.
I would easily shell out something like this for my kids to play with. This seems like something that could survive the normal bonkings that paperbacks suffer under my children's hands. It also looks like the perfect "eBook reader" device, which could help on long car trips. Of course, my kids would probably complain and ask for a DVD.
I'm trying hard to find a solid list of scientific accomplishments for the mission. So far, I'm finding a handful of research articles on microgravity-related changes in human physiology. Hopefully there's more.
I hope the major accomplishment of the ISS isn't just keeping it in orbit.
Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission.
It seems obvious that he sees "fair use" as something to be dismissed (as he does in the next paragraph).
I'm unclear as to why he doesn't have problem with book reviews (which often display portions of a book) or student's book reports. The courts have decided that copyright material can be presented without permission for a number of uses. While this seems completely reasonable to me, I suspect the courts get to decide this one.
SSN is, of course, the hot button piece of ID. The really dumb part is that your SSN is your password for a number of transactions. Unchangeable and nearly public, of course.
Unfortunately the other pieces of information can act as pseudo "passwords" as well. For example, if you know someone's name, account, and address, you can intercept PINs from the mailbox (though it's a felony), and have at their bank account. For most medical offices, as long as you can rattle off a name and birthdate, they'll consider you who you say you are. That's changing, at least in our organization, as we've begun encouraging people to give us a copy of their photo ID to minimize such issues.
At least according to this article. The current vaccine has to be given each year. Some of the money is also earmarked towards treating malaria, which should help in the interim.
Virtually every organism implements homeostasis to some degree. As evolution chugs along, certain mechanisms come into existance that allow them to alter their temperature and other factors as appropriate. The catch is that these mechanisms tend to be expensive (check your heating bill), so there has to be a significant benefit to the organism.
It's silly to argue that warm-blooded organisms are "more advanced". It simply makes more sense in the context of their habitat, food source, and so on. Staying warm in cold water is a tricky business too, one of the reasons large aquatic mammals have done fairly well in my opinion.
Ah, but something encouraged the development of multiple redundant pathways. I suspect that what happened is that a second pathway randomly developed many years ago (probably before modern humans). After that, something came along that killed everyone off who only had the single pathway. I'm speculating that it's a disease, but it could be aliens who had it out for single pathway humans - that's evolution for ya. After my imagined catastrophe, the survivors still had two pathways. This likely had an extra metabolic cost, but it was fairly miniscule.
Human DNA has an awful lot of redundancies in it. I sometimes wonder how many protiens are expressed that just float around not doing much. Most bacteria have trim and efficient DNA. That keeps their energy expenditures low, letting them focus on important things like reproduction. Humans, on the other hand, have a surprising amount of extra stuff collected along the way. It turns out that being extremely efficient isn't a big survival trait for humans.
This article is interesting on several levels. The fact that some people are completely immune to the disease isn't really remarkable. That's been known for quite some time. What's amazing is that this fairly basic gene (a way of bringing stuff into cells) is completely redundant. It makes me wonder how much of our cellular machinery is simply there in case another part fails.
Don't worry. I don't think there's intelligent design behind it. Just cases of plagues that have swept through populations from time to time, causing these interesting redundancies to appear.
This has been discussed on Evil Avatar for awhile now. It seems that for Oblivion at least, that statement isn't entirely true
Gavin Carter: The game's code takes advantage of the multithreaded nature of the Xbox 360 and multithreaded PCs to improve just about every aspect of the game. The primary function is to improve framerates by off-loading some work from the main thread to the other processors. We do a variety of tasks on other threads depending on the situation - be it sound and music, renderer tasks, physics calculations, or anything else that could benefit. Loading also gets spread across hardware threads to aid in load times and provide a more seamless experience for the player.
That's not to say that writing software for multiple cores is easy. It's actually extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks that run on the different cores. I suspect that most early games will run slowly on a single core or somewhat inefficiently on multiple cores. It will be quite some time before developers can figure out how to use all of them efficiently enough.
The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.
Maybe they can get a deal on games like Hitman: Contracts, though I'm not sure they could simply port it over to a tiny hand-held device. They'd have to offer incentives, like finding hidden seconds of the game that lets players partake in real organized crime.
Find all the hidden packages! Become a mob enforcer!
These threads are quickly becoming a rehash of all the previous file sharing threads. Queue the people saying he was breaking the law, the people talking how sharing information isn't stealing, and finally all the people claiming that information wants to be free.
How is this lawsuit different than all the others?
To say that Captain Jack was one of the more memorable and funny characters of last season. The scene where the robots strip him naked and put him in front of a camera was great.
Jack: "Are you broadcasting live?"
(the robots agree)
Jack: "Ladies, are you in for a treat tonight!"
I have reservations, of course. The stories themselves have to be good and the writers have their work cut out for them to make him more than a one-trick pony (so to speak). Still, I'm a sucker for British television as well as sci-fi, so I'll at least give this one a watch.
There's a Flu Wiki that's a good starting point for information about avian influenza. For people who want to follow the news more closely, they can wander over to this discussion board.
I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org. While it may certainly be true, these articles have not been peer reviewed by a scientific journal. Also note that this author appears to have only the single article on the site (which may or may not mean anything - draw your own conclusions).
I think arXiv.org is a great idea - a way for physicists to communicate ideas informally before going through the hassle of getting them published. It's still best to take it all with a grain of salt, as papers here may not be as carefully reviewed as other sources.
I must have left off my sarcasm HTML tags. Yes, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft's issue is that their XBox 360's won't be able to play any Blue-Ray DVDs via a network connection to a PC. Microsoft does indeed want to have their XBox as their living room Media Center device.
To be honest, I'm not sure how big a deal this really is. I may have a home network where video is streamed about, but how many normal people are really going to set this up? Even with wireless connectivity making life easier, I suspect it's simpler to go out and buy a Blue-Ray DVD player (or PS3) and hook it up to your television.
After reading the article, I find myself supporting Microsoft's stance on letting customers stream their DVDs to other devices in the house. Of course, their position may be based upon the fact that the XBox doesn't have a Blue-Ray DVD player, so it's hard to tell if their heart is in the right place. Still, it's in Microsoft's best interest to have lots of tiny computers in a household that share information such as movies - all running Windows, of course.
And if you have small children and don't lock up your remote, this is a very real possibility. At least if you rent the DVD, you can simply pop it back in again.
I can envision ways around it - perhaps the "I've seen it" bit only gets set when you get to the end. Does that mean you can watch all but the last two seconds of a film as many times as you want? Perhaps it gets set in five increment chunks, preventing you from going back too far. What if my wife starts watching and I want to go back with her and watch again from the beginning?
I'm preaching to the choir, but punishing your customers is a lousy business model for anyone besides a dominatrix.
It's fairly well known that the space shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the military. In order to get the budget, they agreed to design requirements that involved weird payloads and the ability to launch them into polar orbit. That in turn drove the design to be what it is today.
In terms of the space station, it seemed to quickly turn into an exercise to divide up the money according to country and state. I'm not even sure what science goes on up there any more. These days the reduced crew seems to spend their time repairing the place. Crazy.
Like most things, it'll depend on issues such as cost, performance, and the timing of where I am in the upgrade process. Adding a second Voodoo 2 for $30 was great, as that's basically pocket change. Of course, by that time the computer was my secondary computer anyway. The boost in performance was nice, but not critical.
I typically have two gaming computers at any one time. It doesn't have to be top-notch, but it's handy if it has reasonably good performance. When it stutters or is slow, my son makes me play on it and takes the fast one for himself.
NVidia currently has a couple SLI cards, which perform quite well. I recently picked up a 7800 GT, the low-end of the high-end cards, for around $350. The plan is to pick up a second one when the price drops to around $100. It's very reminiscent of my Voodoo 2 experience - the first cost $300 and the second cost $30.
Of course, Crossfire has the benefit of working with any other ATI card past a certain point. With NVidia's offerings, you have to match the card exactly (though supposedly the manufacturer doesn't matter). For my needs, it doesn't matter all that much, but it's something to consider.
Not that I'm a fanboy of either vendor. My last card was a Radeon 9800 Pro, which has worked great these last couple years. Now it seems that NVidia has the card that works best for my needs. Ain't competition grand?
Neverwinter nights experience . . .
on
Games Can Make Us Cry
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've created a fair number of Neverwinter Nights modules and I was always surprised by the strong emotional reactions some players had. They'd report tears, joy, and fury.
The key is for developers to tap into those strong emotions, telling a story that involves the player, encouraging them to invest a portion of their emotions into the game.
Players will walk through a swamp for gold and fight an army for vengeance, but they'll walk to the ends of Hell for love.
Slashdot Mirror
The Monroe Doctrine essentially told European powers to say out of the affairs of the Americas. In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses.
Perhaps the "World Domination Doctrine" would be a more apt name.
I would easily shell out something like this for my kids to play with. This seems like something that could survive the normal bonkings that paperbacks suffer under my children's hands. It also looks like the perfect "eBook reader" device, which could help on long car trips. Of course, my kids would probably complain and ask for a DVD.
Must . . . resist . . . grammar . . . posting . . .
I'm trying hard to find a solid list of scientific accomplishments for the mission. So far, I'm finding a handful of research articles on microgravity-related changes in human physiology. Hopefully there's more.
I hope the major accomplishment of the ISS isn't just keeping it in orbit.
Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission.
It seems obvious that he sees "fair use" as something to be dismissed (as he does in the next paragraph).
I'm unclear as to why he doesn't have problem with book reviews (which often display portions of a book) or student's book reports. The courts have decided that copyright material can be presented without permission for a number of uses. While this seems completely reasonable to me, I suspect the courts get to decide this one.
EFF has an interesting analysis on this as well.
SSN is, of course, the hot button piece of ID. The really dumb part is that your SSN is your password for a number of transactions. Unchangeable and nearly public, of course.
Unfortunately the other pieces of information can act as pseudo "passwords" as well. For example, if you know someone's name, account, and address, you can intercept PINs from the mailbox (though it's a felony), and have at their bank account. For most medical offices, as long as you can rattle off a name and birthdate, they'll consider you who you say you are. That's changing, at least in our organization, as we've begun encouraging people to give us a copy of their photo ID to minimize such issues.
At least according to this article. The current vaccine has to be given each year. Some of the money is also earmarked towards treating malaria, which should help in the interim.
Virtually every organism implements homeostasis to some degree. As evolution chugs along, certain mechanisms come into existance that allow them to alter their temperature and other factors as appropriate. The catch is that these mechanisms tend to be expensive (check your heating bill), so there has to be a significant benefit to the organism.
It's silly to argue that warm-blooded organisms are "more advanced". It simply makes more sense in the context of their habitat, food source, and so on. Staying warm in cold water is a tricky business too, one of the reasons large aquatic mammals have done fairly well in my opinion.
Ah, but something encouraged the development of multiple redundant pathways. I suspect that what happened is that a second pathway randomly developed many years ago (probably before modern humans). After that, something came along that killed everyone off who only had the single pathway. I'm speculating that it's a disease, but it could be aliens who had it out for single pathway humans - that's evolution for ya. After my imagined catastrophe, the survivors still had two pathways. This likely had an extra metabolic cost, but it was fairly miniscule.
Human DNA has an awful lot of redundancies in it. I sometimes wonder how many protiens are expressed that just float around not doing much. Most bacteria have trim and efficient DNA. That keeps their energy expenditures low, letting them focus on important things like reproduction. Humans, on the other hand, have a surprising amount of extra stuff collected along the way. It turns out that being extremely efficient isn't a big survival trait for humans.
. . . is another's saving trait.
This article is interesting on several levels. The fact that some people are completely immune to the disease isn't really remarkable. That's been known for quite some time. What's amazing is that this fairly basic gene (a way of bringing stuff into cells) is completely redundant. It makes me wonder how much of our cellular machinery is simply there in case another part fails.
Don't worry. I don't think there's intelligent design behind it. Just cases of plagues that have swept through populations from time to time, causing these interesting redundancies to appear.
This has been discussed on Evil Avatar for awhile now. It seems that for Oblivion at least, that statement isn't entirely true
Gavin Carter: The game's code takes advantage of the multithreaded nature of the Xbox 360 and multithreaded PCs to improve just about every aspect of the game. The primary function is to improve framerates by off-loading some work from the main thread to the other processors. We do a variety of tasks on other threads depending on the situation - be it sound and music, renderer tasks, physics calculations, or anything else that could benefit. Loading also gets spread across hardware threads to aid in load times and provide a more seamless experience for the player.
That's not to say that writing software for multiple cores is easy. It's actually extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks that run on the different cores. I suspect that most early games will run slowly on a single core or somewhat inefficiently on multiple cores. It will be quite some time before developers can figure out how to use all of them efficiently enough.
The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.
Maybe they can get a deal on games like Hitman: Contracts, though I'm not sure they could simply port it over to a tiny hand-held device. They'd have to offer incentives, like finding hidden seconds of the game that lets players partake in real organized crime.
Find all the hidden packages! Become a mob enforcer!
These threads are quickly becoming a rehash of all the previous file sharing threads. Queue the people saying he was breaking the law, the people talking how sharing information isn't stealing, and finally all the people claiming that information wants to be free.
How is this lawsuit different than all the others?
There was an interesting post awhile back that introduced me to the term. I think that's what you're looking for.
To say that Captain Jack was one of the more memorable and funny characters of last season. The scene where the robots strip him naked and put him in front of a camera was great.
Jack: "Are you broadcasting live?"
(the robots agree)
Jack: "Ladies, are you in for a treat tonight!"
I have reservations, of course. The stories themselves have to be good and the writers have their work cut out for them to make him more than a one-trick pony (so to speak). Still, I'm a sucker for British television as well as sci-fi, so I'll at least give this one a watch.
There's a Flu Wiki that's a good starting point for information about avian influenza. For people who want to follow the news more closely, they can wander over to this discussion board.
I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org. While it may certainly be true, these articles have not been peer reviewed by a scientific journal. Also note that this author appears to have only the single article on the site (which may or may not mean anything - draw your own conclusions).
I think arXiv.org is a great idea - a way for physicists to communicate ideas informally before going through the hassle of getting them published. It's still best to take it all with a grain of salt, as papers here may not be as carefully reviewed as other sources.
I must have left off my sarcasm HTML tags. Yes, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft's issue is that their XBox 360's won't be able to play any Blue-Ray DVDs via a network connection to a PC. Microsoft does indeed want to have their XBox as their living room Media Center device.
To be honest, I'm not sure how big a deal this really is. I may have a home network where video is streamed about, but how many normal people are really going to set this up? Even with wireless connectivity making life easier, I suspect it's simpler to go out and buy a Blue-Ray DVD player (or PS3) and hook it up to your television.
After reading the article, I find myself supporting Microsoft's stance on letting customers stream their DVDs to other devices in the house. Of course, their position may be based upon the fact that the XBox doesn't have a Blue-Ray DVD player, so it's hard to tell if their heart is in the right place. Still, it's in Microsoft's best interest to have lots of tiny computers in a household that share information such as movies - all running Windows, of course.
And if you have small children and don't lock up your remote, this is a very real possibility. At least if you rent the DVD, you can simply pop it back in again.
I can envision ways around it - perhaps the "I've seen it" bit only gets set when you get to the end. Does that mean you can watch all but the last two seconds of a film as many times as you want? Perhaps it gets set in five increment chunks, preventing you from going back too far. What if my wife starts watching and I want to go back with her and watch again from the beginning?
I'm preaching to the choir, but punishing your customers is a lousy business model for anyone besides a dominatrix.
It's fairly well known that the space shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the military. In order to get the budget, they agreed to design requirements that involved weird payloads and the ability to launch them into polar orbit. That in turn drove the design to be what it is today.
In terms of the space station, it seemed to quickly turn into an exercise to divide up the money according to country and state. I'm not even sure what science goes on up there any more. These days the reduced crew seems to spend their time repairing the place. Crazy.
Like most things, it'll depend on issues such as cost, performance, and the timing of where I am in the upgrade process. Adding a second Voodoo 2 for $30 was great, as that's basically pocket change. Of course, by that time the computer was my secondary computer anyway. The boost in performance was nice, but not critical.
I typically have two gaming computers at any one time. It doesn't have to be top-notch, but it's handy if it has reasonably good performance. When it stutters or is slow, my son makes me play on it and takes the fast one for himself.
NVidia currently has a couple SLI cards, which perform quite well. I recently picked up a 7800 GT, the low-end of the high-end cards, for around $350. The plan is to pick up a second one when the price drops to around $100. It's very reminiscent of my Voodoo 2 experience - the first cost $300 and the second cost $30.
Of course, Crossfire has the benefit of working with any other ATI card past a certain point. With NVidia's offerings, you have to match the card exactly (though supposedly the manufacturer doesn't matter). For my needs, it doesn't matter all that much, but it's something to consider.
Not that I'm a fanboy of either vendor. My last card was a Radeon 9800 Pro, which has worked great these last couple years. Now it seems that NVidia has the card that works best for my needs. Ain't competition grand?
I've created a fair number of Neverwinter Nights modules and I was always surprised by the strong emotional reactions some players had. They'd report tears, joy, and fury.
The key is for developers to tap into those strong emotions, telling a story that involves the player, encouraging them to invest a portion of their emotions into the game.
Players will walk through a swamp for gold and fight an army for vengeance, but they'll walk to the ends of Hell for love.
Can I just detonate a fusion bomb and send NASA guys out into the parking lot to catch the debris that rains down?